INEVITABILITY
The doctrine of the inevitable is something that drives ethicists absolutely bonkers. It is the fundamental recognition that there are just some things that are going to happen no matter what and nothing that they say or do can prevent it.
There are some pretty obvious examples: cloning, gay marriage, nuclear weapons development, all hotly debated and moving forward like a freight train because the people who matter, the folks who actually want them, do not care about the debate, they only care about what they want and they will get what they want. And we can look to past arguments to see how that happened, ending censorship (though that fight still continues on the fringes but as we can now transmit ideas directly into the brains of people it is a truly victorious cause), contraception (that fight lasted eighty years) and abortion which is pretty much now a settled practice in civilized society.
It all points to a basic, fundamental weakness of the use of an ethical principal in a dispute. It only works if all parties agree on the principal. If the principal is rejected out of hand, the ethicist has no tools to deal with that.
So the key to dealing with the ethical argument is simply not to engage in the argument. Just say that you don't care and that you are going to do it anyway. That is the best way to silence them because there is simply no response that they can make.
The doctrine of the inevitable is something that drives ethicists absolutely bonkers. It is the fundamental recognition that there are just some things that are going to happen no matter what and nothing that they say or do can prevent it.
There are some pretty obvious examples: cloning, gay marriage, nuclear weapons development, all hotly debated and moving forward like a freight train because the people who matter, the folks who actually want them, do not care about the debate, they only care about what they want and they will get what they want. And we can look to past arguments to see how that happened, ending censorship (though that fight still continues on the fringes but as we can now transmit ideas directly into the brains of people it is a truly victorious cause), contraception (that fight lasted eighty years) and abortion which is pretty much now a settled practice in civilized society.
It all points to a basic, fundamental weakness of the use of an ethical principal in a dispute. It only works if all parties agree on the principal. If the principal is rejected out of hand, the ethicist has no tools to deal with that.
So the key to dealing with the ethical argument is simply not to engage in the argument. Just say that you don't care and that you are going to do it anyway. That is the best way to silence them because there is simply no response that they can make.